Erin John LeFevre

Posted 28 June 2006 - 12:35 PM

Interests:I'm interested in writing music, making maps, hiking around my home in the mountains of Colorado, and spending time with my family and friends.

United States

Is there anything I can to do to help prevent corrupt Illustrator files? A co-worker and I are working on a series of large maps (42" 72" around 250mb each with lot's of symbolized points) and we are almost finished. However, it is getting to the point where we can't save the .ai without it corrupting. Currently I'm at a stand- still (a show-down) with my machine... trying to save without any luck. I've tried saving a copy, save as, save as pdf, save, et cetera.

I've removed all unnecessary attribute data (MaPublisher), all un-used symbols and graphic styles, using lower res images and linking all images. What am I missing?

Rob

Posted 28 June 2006 - 01:26 PM

Rob

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Erin, my heart bleeds for you....

I've run into similar problems, and like your situation, I don't think it's related directly to file size, because it seems like you probably have enough power to handle a 250mb file. What I've found to work in some situations, and I don't know why, is to save the file to a different directory, preferably one with a very short path and short file name, like C:\temp\stupidfile.ai

benbakelaar

Posted 28 June 2006 - 02:01 PM

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Erin, based on my experience in IT, I'm not sure if this applies to you, but I guess it's worth mentioning. If any application in Windows freezes on a large file... opening... saving... exporting... etc. and your screen gets all choppy and blank, etc. that does not _necessarily_ mean the process has been interrupted. Often if you wait 5 minutes (or longer if you are patient enough) you will find everything back to normal. Now, also based on my experience, there are times when it simply freezes right away and no matter how long you wait, nothing will happen. But in my opinion, almost all applications running under Windows have trouble with "large" files (250mb to me counts as a large file). And also, just in case, don't work with large files over the network. If you must, make a local copy, work on it, and then copy back to the server.

Erin John LeFevre

Posted 28 June 2006 - 02:43 PM

Interests:I'm interested in writing music, making maps, hiking around my home in the mountains of Colorado, and spending time with my family and friends.

United States

Erin, my heart bleeds for you....

What I've found to work in some situations, and I don't know why, is to save the file to a different directory, preferably one with a very short path and short file name, like C:\temp\stupidfile.ai

Rob,Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated. I'll give this a try and see what happens. Basically I've resorted to working from a back-up file I created on Monday. We suspect that the problem may be originating from an outer glow I had applied to the edge of the continental US (topo background image). Maybe applying a glow like this was a bad idea? thanks again.

Erin John LeFevre

Posted 28 June 2006 - 02:50 PM

Interests:I'm interested in writing music, making maps, hiking around my home in the mountains of Colorado, and spending time with my family and friends.

United States

If any application in Windows freezes on a large file... opening... saving... exporting... etc. and your screen gets all choppy and blank, etc. that does not _necessarily_ mean the process has been interrupted. Often if you wait 5 minutes (or longer if you are patient enough) you will find everything back to normal. Now, also based on my experience, there are times when it simply freezes right away and no matter how long you wait, nothing will happen. But in my opinion, almost all applications running under Windows have trouble with "large" files (250mb to me counts as a large file). And also, just in case, don't work with large files over the network. If you must, make a local copy, work on it, and then copy back to the server.

Thanks for the reply Ben. Instead of freezing and taking a long time to save...when the file corrupts it finishes saving in about 3 seconds. I can always tell when I get a good save because it will take much longer. Usually a couple of minutes. Also, I don't work from a network drive....but I do copy files back and forth between my C drive and a shared network drive.

mike

Posted 30 June 2006 - 11:02 AM

mike

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One other thing to try is to turn off all the layers before saving...

i often work with some large AI files and have found this to work well. by turning off all layers, it prevents it from taking a long time to load when opening up the file. it also saves a little faster too.

AlexKRE

Posted 06 September 2011 - 10:49 PM

AlexKRE

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For restore lost or corrupted ai files you may use illustrator recovery. It has different facilities for resolving out almost every issues with illustrator files. The tool starts under all Windows OS and any system configuration.